‘The film opens with a spinning globe and a zoom-in shot towards Western Europe and France. The map fades into a larger-scale map of Europe centred on Paris, from which a bold line is drawn toward the South through Marseille, the Mediterranean Sea, Oran and finally Casablanca, the setting for the film. At this point, the map dissolves into a view from a high roof in the city, followed by a vertical panoramic (tilt shot) that takes the audience down to the busy streets of Casablanca. In 1 min, we have crossed multiple scales from the entire globe to the street level. This journey predates several of the zooming capabilities developed more than 60 years later in virtual globes. First, it integrates the combination of the spinning globe with a zoom effect on a specific point. Second, it uses a similar ‘jump’ effect as the one currently available in Google Earth to move from one place to another. In this case, the journey from Paris to Casablanca starts with a zoom in on Paris, followed by a zoom out moving toward Southern Europe, then a zoom in to Morocco and finally Casablanca. The jump effect is very compelling as it simultaneously follows the journey from Paris to Casablanca being traced on the map. Third, the perspective changes from 90 degreeview of the cartographic representation of the world, to an oblique perspective of the streets of Casablanca and resonates with the recent development of street views functionalities in applications such as Google Map.’ Sébastien Caquard, Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic Maps in Films’, The Cartographic Journal 46.1 (2009)

Hi, in the map of Spain, at the begining of the movie, you can read just a few cities, the most important, like Zaragoza, Barcelona or Madrid. But does anybody know why it is also Yecla on the map?! Yecla was only a very small village in Murcia by then. Why is it in the map of Casablanca? Thank you.